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WordCamp Thoughts, Audio, Images: Soon

I just arrived safely back in Florida an hour or two ago. WordCamp was amazing. San Francisco was amazing. I took far too few photographs, because I was just so busy taking it all in and meeting all the great people. Luckily, others made up for my image-taking shortcomings, especially Donncha. I don’t have time now, but when I get some I’ll be posting all my thoughts, the audio files I recorded of the sessions, the images I took, and I’ll link to others who have done the same.

Question: For a static (for lack of a better term) site what would you use for persitant navigation: Pages or Categories?

It depends on how many levels of children you need. With Categories, you can use them as your hierarchy, and then you can have multiple posts within each hierarchy, and multiple comments for each post. With WP Pages, they act as your hierarchy, and they can have both comments as a sort of “child,” but also other pages, which could have their own comments and other pages and so forth. With categories as your top level, once you place a post within a category, you are limiting yourself to only comments as a subset of that post. Also consider that with categories, the categories are only containers… not actual endpoints. At least, not without some serious hacking of the back end, maybe using the category description field as content for that category object.

In general, Pages are the way to go, because a page can be an endpoint, a parent to comments, and a parent to other pages, which gives you a lot of flexibility!

Be sure to check out my Subpage Listing plugin, which is the one that I used live during my discussion to have children of a page listed in a tree structure within a page’s actual content. And actually, if you view my code page you can see it in action there.

Thanks for making the trek to SF, Mark. I learned a lot from both of your sessions.

I also wanted to give you a personal thank you for giving me some of your time between sessions, and answering my questions. I was that guy who’s site went down after being dugg. I was asking you about excessive php processing, moving my database from one host to another, and trying to figure out why my database was so big… 205MB. You really helped me a lot. I appreciate it very much.

FYI… I figured out why my database was so big. In a 205MB database, I had 200MB of spam comments being held by Akismet (40,000+ comments, yikes!). At first I thought Akismet was broken, and not deleting them after 15 days, but I tracked it after I deleted the comments, and I’m getting 2,500 – 3,000 spam comments a day. So, that would be about the right number after 15 days. Damn spammers!

Anyway, thanks again for your help… and all the work you do on WordPress. It’s appreciated!

Paul,
It was nice talking to you too! Glad I could help. I didn’t even think that spam could be the issue with your huge database… that’s an insane amount of spam, especially with Bad Behavior installed, which is probably blocking even more.

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